My goal has always been to give you as much information and knowledge as possible. So, if you’re looking for a week-by-week guide to planning a podcast or tips for beginners, this blog can allow you to hit the ground running.

As you may know, podcasts used to be a second thought and a barely noticed content platform. It then became one of the hottest media ecosystems. Because of its quick rise to fame, it’s something I know every entrepreneur can benefit from with the right strategies.

When you think about podcasts, you think about the power of narrative.

Words are powerful.

What Can You Leverage With A Podcast?

Podcasts drive purpose, deliver thoughts and create action. Audio and voice are by far the most natural way for humans to interact.

We are genetically designed to listen.

You can leverage your words using audio to:

Spread content

Present new perspectives

Deliver Thought Leadership

Empower audiences

With that in mind, every business associate or owner needs to understand podcasts, and not be afraid of them. Podcasts deliver content in a way that no other form can. To better understand this concept, I have posted some of my best podcasts tips for beginners that I share with my clients.

10 Podcast Tips For Beginners

This webinar series is all about digging into the deep rewards of podcasts and webinars.

If you’re new to podcasts, keep reading to understand the basics, then join us on our YouTube channel and catch up with all the episodes.

1. Your Podcast Should Serve A Purpose

Your purpose helps you identify a solid topic for your listeners. What would you like your audience to know? It is crucial to select a topic that will be educational for your listeners. Be sure to also select a subject that you and your presenter are comfortable speaking about. Once you have ironed out ‘what’ this looks like, take some time to analyze the subject matter and why it would be of interest to your audience.

Identify a few standout concepts or ideas to talk about during the series.

For example: If you plan on creating a podcast about launching a small businesses, focus on something specific relating to this topic. That way, you can draw in your listeners one step at a time.

Don’t try to cover every aspect of a small business, just what you know will be vital for listeners to be informed and what you know will benefit them.

Another great tip is to think about who is listening, are you talking to the financial, marketing, or HR team?

From there, you will be able to address the real-world benefits of putting the strategies you’re teaching into practice.

2. Give Your Podcast A Distinct Brand

While walking down the aisles of a supermarket, you remember you have to buy some ketchup. There is a wide array of options presented to you, but how do you decide on one?

One word—Branding

The same can be said about a successful podcast. Each podcast has a certain uniqueness it brings to the table. That unique flare is what keeps listeners attentive and loyal.

When starting a podcast, remember that people develop a better impression when it provides some sort of distinctiveness.

That may be the energy levels, style of conversation or the type of influencers brought in.

In other words, it has a brand.

One of the best ways to give your podcast a distinct brand is to establish yourself as an authority in your niche or industry. Always produce helpful content.

Analyze your existing target market. As a business, you should already know your audience and their needs. So you should be able to provide them with proper tips and knowledge.

3. Continue a Consistent Publishing Schedule

Getting your podcast out on available platforms is one thing, but the pivotal factor in building an audience is uploading regularly.

Depending on your availability, this could mean weekly, bi-weekly or even monthly.

Remember, people are creatures of habits, giving your audience a schedule that you can realistically adhere to allows your audience to build the habit of listening to you.

4. Create an Action Plan

Before you turn on the mic and bring in the experts, it would be advisable to create an action plan. This action plan will help you and your speakers organized prior to the event.

Key characteristics of the action plan would include:

An outline of your subtopics

The people you’re bringing in

How much time you’ll spend talking about each sub-topic

The burning questions you want to cover

Plot out how you will record, edit, publish and promote your podcast. Break it down into specific and actionable steps.

Word of advice, just because you formulated a plan, doesn’t mean you have to follow it to a T.

The purpose of the plan is to guide you through planning out the podcast. Don’t make it too structured, some sort of informality is welcomed by your listeners.

This is also because you want the podcast to seem conversational, authentic and casual.

5. Invest in Quality Equipment

No one wants to listen to a podcast with below-par audio quality.

It doesn’t matter how intriguing your topics are, or which amazing guests you bring on. If your audio doesn’t sound crisp, you’re going to lose your audience before you even begin recording.

Investing in great audio recording software, good quality microphones and editing tools will go a long way in helping you create a winning podcast.

Then, come back here and learn more about webinar lead generation and the importance of lead scoring.

The Importance of Scoring Leads

As mentioned in many of our previous blog posts, webinars are great evergreen content.

You can take snackable content bits from a product demo (or “deminar”) and turn it into a video for your website. Or, you can use it as a promotional content for social media.

None of that really matters if your webinars aren’t tailored your various leads.

Let’s Put It Into Perspective

Think about what you can do in an hour:

Manage your emails.

Hold meetings (productive or not).

Create ads for your business.

Finish time-sensitive reports.

Plan for your next content campaign.

The point I’m making is that a lot can be accomplished in an hour. Which means, it’s a great sign if you’re viewers taking at least an hour out their busy schedules to watch your webinar.
Their lead scores should reflect their interest. Keep in mind: There’s a difference between a lead who registers and the lead who actually watches your webinar.

Don’t Stop At Total View Time

But lead scoring doesn’t stop there. How long did this lead stay for?
A lead who watched for the full hour deserves more attention than a lead who only viewed your webinar for only 10 minutes.
You can’t only look at the total view time. You also need to ask yourself:

What did they do during the time that they were watching your webinar?

Was this lead passively watching?

Were they asking questions?

Every business has its own lead score range. Make sure the one you implement makes sense for your business.

For example:

What if your webinar lead generation scoring only gives 5 points for signing up, but they needed 100 points to be qualified for sales?
That’s going to take a lot of time before your MQL to qualify as an SQL. You could be missing out on a sale because your scoring is too low.
Instead, look at what they’re doing:

Are they actively asking questions during your webinar?

Or, are they downloading your lead magnet.

These viewers are looking for an answer to their problem and believe that you may have that answer.
At this point, these leads are closer to the bottom of your funnel (BOFU) and should get a higher lead score.
Now that we’ve sorted out a bit of scoring, let dive into the webinar lead generation.

3 Tips To Improve WEbinar Lead Generation

Here are some simple tactics you can start applying today to generate more webinar leads.

1. Exhibit Scarcity

Get on social media. Tell your audience how you only have a few spots left. Maybe 100, or even a 1000 people have already signed up for your webinar.

2. What Happens Next?

What next steps do you give your audience? You’re not just going to end the webinar without an ask, are you?

Instead, create a calendar for your website with all your upcoming webinar events. Maybe someone can’t make your webinar for next Tuesday, but they’re free to watch it the following Thursday.

This is a great strategy to start getting some sign-ups in advance.

And, you should always remember to share lead magnets with your events.

If your attendees download your lead magnet, keep track of that because you’ll need to up their lead score.

3. Always Follow Up

Send an immediate email after your webinar. Just follow up and thank your viewers for attending the webinar.

Segment the list into “attended” viewers and “registered but failed to attend.”

Thank the former for their attendance and let the latter know that you are sorry that they could not attend.

This way, you are still engaging all of your leads. (And if they open the email, give add a tick to their lead score.)

Don’t forget: Send everyone an on-demand version of your webinar for them to watch on their own time.

Webinar Lead-Gen: Let's Recap

First and foremost, make sure you have a proper lead scoring in place before you being implementing any webinar lead generation strategies.

After that, you can implement 3 easy lead-gen tactics:

Exhibit Scarcity: let your prospective viewers know that other people are interested in your webinar and there’s not a lot of seats left.

What Happens Next?: Don’t leave your audience hanging. Keep a calendar of your next webinar dates. And never forget to give your audience a lead magnet.

Always Follow-Up: Thank your audience for attending right after your webinar is done. Give them the option to watch it again on demand. Be sure to segment your lists to attended and not attended, tailor your message accordingly.

2. The Power of Evergreen Content

They will continuously provide value to new leads. Choose a relevant topic that resonates with your audience.

One of the best aspects of Evergreen Content is that you don’t need to make it from scratch.

Another benefit is that they’re perfect for repurposing content.

Stuck on ideas?

You can make podcasts out of content you’ve already created.

Take a blog, white paper, or a lead magnet that your audience has previously engaged with. Turn that into a podcast. You already have the raw materials to create it, which will save you time and energy as well.

Plus, you can use this as a chance to better understand your audience using A/B testing.

Do your leads prefer downloading and reading your content?

Are they more interactive and engaged with your podcast series?

These metrics will allow you to analyze what your leads are interested in on a group and individual basis.

3. Be "The Convenient" Thought Leader

In general, blogs can be anywhere between 700-1200 words long.

That’s a lot of information to consume in one sitting. That’s also assuming your readers will read your entire blog at once.

Podcasts can be played while your audience is:

At the gym

Cooking dinner

Working

Doing laundry

Simply put, podcasts cut through the clutter.

Instead of reading long-form blogs or articles to educate oneself, they can multitask between their daily activities and consuming your content.

The benefits of podcasting for listeners is that their chores become more pleasant.

Connecting through your writing is different from connecting through your actual voice.

You can easily connect and nurture qualified leads using email marketing.

For instance, if your audience is interested in your opinion on current eCommerce tactics, send them a lead magnet about it.

You can do this with tagging in your email platform pretty easily, and the whole thing just piggybacks on the content you’ve already made.

Let's Recap: Benefits Of Podcasts

So, besides the fact that podcasts are measurable and trackable, there are specific content benefits of podcasts that will help you qualify leads and gain more exposure.

Become A Thought Leader: Use podcasts as a way to leverage your position in your business or industry. Build trust with your audience to create brand-loyal customers.

The Power Of Evergreen Content: Podcasts give you the ability to continuously provide value to new leads. Add your podcasts to a Multimedia Hub and you’ll have ample opportunity to build a bigger and more qualified following.

Be A “Convenient” Thought Leader: Work smarter, not harder, and save on agency or production hours by repurposing blogs and content that you already have. Plus, be the Thought Leader your audience can listen to where and when they want to.

Stay tuned for more updates on how to leverage your webinars to convert viewers into buyers.

We’ve previously discussed the importance of forecasting revenue with realistic goals. As we know, revenue is calculated by subtracting your costs from your profit. How else can you increase webinar ROI?

Simple. Reduce the costs of your webinar production and implementation.

I’ve put together a few simple strategies you can follow in order to get the most out of your webinar strategies.

1. Increase Webinar ROI With Automation

Look at what you’re doing manually. Is there anything that can be automated?

List out the tasks you do manually, then review with your CRM or webinar platform. See what can be automated using the platforms you already have.

For example, we’ve discussed promotional strategies such as email marketing. Most email marketing platforms, such as ActiveCampaign offer a ton of automation options such as:

Invites

Confirmations

Reminders

Follow-ups

Think of the time you’re already saving using multiple automations for your email marketing campaigns. You likely shave off 8-10 hours of labour for every webinar event you market.

Think of the ROI that you’ve earned your business.

2. Develop Simple Processes

Similar to automations, you should have a process in place wherever you can. This way, you and your team won’t be starting from scratch every time you plan a webinar.

For example, have a basic plan or conversational template for your speaker to follow. It reduces the planning time for individual webinars and keeps everything on track, including answering helpful questions for interested leads.

What about planning out your webinar? Do you want to start from scratch every time? That’s just not profitable.

Switch it up with speakers in an interview setting, ask questions, offer lead magnets. Find new ways to keep your viewers engaged throughout your webinar.

4. Where is the Actual Value for Viewers?

Let’s say that you have already created your brand awareness content at the top of the funnel.

What’s next?

Now that they know who you are, they want to see how you can help them. If you’re not sure what your webinar content should entail, talk with your business development or sales team.

They are a wealth of information as they deal with prospective leads all the time.

Your friends over at the business development department are very good at identifying and addressing pain points. Most likely, your webinar attendees share the same pain points and obstacles.

Sit down with them to curate a list of webinar topics you can discuss over your production timeline (aim to have a calendar with at least three months of webinars planned out).

Alternatively, look at what your most popular lead magnets and assets are. Maybe you have a few case studies that resonate well with your website visitors.

Turn that content into a webinar.

5. What Are Top Performers Doing?

It is understandable that large enterprises with bigger budgets are able to produce quality webinars that attract 1000+ live and on-demand viewers per event.

However, that’s not their only advantage. Start implementing two of their tactics in order to increase your viewership and increase webinar ROI:

The Netflix Effect: Combine all your webinar content in a playlist for your hub, website, or YouTube channel so that leads can access everything in one place and start binging your webinars.

Snackable Style: Identify parts of your webinar that have relevant and evergreen content. Repurpose these sections into a promotional social media video that you can share among your leads.

Use our Multimedia Hub to house and edit your webinars for snackable content.

Let’s Recap:

We want to get the most from our webinar strategies, and especially want to increase webinar ROI. In order to do that you have to look at what you can do differently.

Your highest webinar costs will be labour and production: Automation and processes help you to spend fewer marketing dollars on manual tasks and more time preparing for a successful webinar.

Is your webinar content resonating with what your leads are looking for? Spend time with your sales team and outline all existing pain points within your prospective leads and address them in your next webinar series.

Leverage tactics used by enterprises such as The Netflix Effect. Combine your content in an easy-to-view playlist, then create snackable bites to repurpose and promote your playlist.

Follow these strategies in order to reduce labour and production costs while increasing your ROI.

Same content, new webinar: Take your notes, slide deck, any promotional content and other assets, but run the webinar as if it is brand new. Change the title, adjust the questions in your Q&A, or try applying more engagement tools.

Leverage Simulive webinars: Previously recorded content will be presented as if it’s a live webinar. The only live element will be near the end of your event where you come on and answer any questions from your webinar. Product demos and tutorials work great with Simulive webinars.

Promoting on-demand webinars: Replay your live webinars as on-demand for viewers who could not attend your live event. This can be particularly useful in building out Evergreen content, syndicating them on third-party sites, and serving customers in different time zones.

Whichever approach you take, here are the stages you should go through to make your refreshed webinar a success.

Review Existing Webinars For Time Sensitive Materials

Before promoting your existing webinars, rewatch the recording and review any related assets.

This is particularly important if you plan to run a previous session as a Simulive webinar. In this case, keep a careful eye out for dates and times.

Ensure that slides don’t have a date on them that is in the past. If you happened to do a screen-share, check that there is no give-away date or time in the menu bar.

For on-demand webinars, these dates are not as important, but you may want to reconsider their use on slides going forward in order to re-purpose them as Evergreen content.

In general, review your content and give it a refresh as needed. Maybe you were reporting on your old statistics in your slides, or reference material that may be out of date.

Keep an eye on these key points to ensure your content is never outdated.

Go Through Your Webinar Checklist

Much like your live event, ensure that everything is set up properly to generate new webinar registrants.

Use your webinar console to set a date and time for your session, or to publish it as an on-demand asset.

Promote Your “New” Simulive Webinar With Social Media

Start posting existing content that’s related to the webinar, such as blog posts, to social media. Look at using other tactics to start driving traffic and building authority.

Taking such an approach helps you achieve two things: firstly, it renews interest in the subject of your webinar, and secondly, it allows you to gauge the level of interest.

This can help you decide which of your old webinars you will look to promote most aggressively, which can be particularly important if you have limited budgets and resources.

Webinar Promotions Always Start 2 Weeks Ahead Of The Live Event

It’s best to promote your webinar over a longer period, ramping up intensity as the date of broadcast draws nearer.

We suggest starting promoting at least two weeks before the day it’s due to go out, based on data in our Webinar Benchmarks Report.

In this episode, we’re going to focus specifically on not-for-profit webinars. We offer specific insights into the benefits of using live events as a networking tool.

Tune in to discuss not-for-profit webinars conversation with the experts:

What is the value in creating not-for-profit webinars? We’ll tackle the key benefits of not-for-profit webinars, including new audience reach opportunities.

How a not-for-profit organization put live and virtual strategies to use. We’ll break down real-life success stories about multi-regional engagement from TESL.

How have not-for-profit webinars enhanced their membership and funding? We discuss the value in anonymous audience engagement that is unique to many not-for-profits such as Autism Ontario.

Tips for hosting not-for-profit webinars:We’re giving you some of our best tips to those NFPs looking to move into webinars and live virtual events.

Having a multimedia hub is a huge benefit if your goals are to increase reach, views, and membership funding.

The Complete Transcript On Not-For-Profit Webinars

Peter Vamos: Welcome to LFTF, the podcast about turning your webinar into a lead generation machine and advancing your business objectives. With me as usual, Matthew Ley, president of The Streaming Network.

Matthew Ley: Thanks for having me, Pete. And you–I believe that is what you said last time for the title.

Peter Vamos: I think I nailed it. That’s it.

Matthew Ley: So, I think maybe we’ve gotten the same–.

Peter Vamos: –We got it–.

Matthew Ley: –Title twice in a row–.

Peter Vamos: –We got it, so–.

Matthew Ley: –But we’re not talking about lead generation today.

Peter Vamos: No. Well, a little bit.

Matthew Ley: Okay.

Peter Vamos: It’s a–I think–and we’ll get into it. But one of the–so, what we want to talk about is not-for-profits. And I was reading an article talking about how not-for-profits use advanced webinar, virtual events platforms.

Matthew Ley: Yep.

Peter Vamos: And we spend a lot of time talking about, you know, how business–businesses can use–.

Matthew Ley: –Yeah–.

Peter Vamos: –Our platform as a lead generation tool. But there’s–you know, I was surprised to learn that these NFPs are using them for, like, communication strategies.

Matthew Ley: Yeah.

Peter Vamos: And so, what’s driving that? Like, what are we seeing right now when we–and we deal with some of these–.

Matthew Ley: –Yeah–.

Peter Vamos: –Types of companies, right?

Matthew Ley: Yeah, we do. And, I mean, I don’t think it’s any surprise. I think that, you know, this podcast will be listened to by people who aren’t used to our program, I think–.

Peter Vamos: –Um-hmm–.

Matthew Ley: –Because it’ll be not-for-profits that’ll be showing up. But–and I’m not saying anything that they don’t know, that 51% of associations out there are facing a decline in membership. And the reason that the audiences are not, you know, re-signing up or not seeing value is they feel that there is a lack of engagement with the associations.

So, they’re struggling to find a technology mechanism to reach everyone. Webinar has been part of the kit for a long time. But really, these associations used to rely on–in-person chapter events was the big thing, getting everyone in a room, whether it was the Chamber of Commerce or any other not-for-profit that we all know well.

And it’s a–they’re facing the same struggles that all of our marketers and everyone else is facing, and that is it’s a changing world. It’s a–changing demographics of people that they’re trying to reach. And there is a battle for time that is greater than it’s ever been with everything available to us at our fingertips. And so, they have a declining number of bums in seats.

Combine that with declining membership and they need to find ways of using technology like webinars that, again, have been part of their kit for a while, to better engage their audience so–or their members. So, a lot of them are really taking to the technology.

Peter Vamos: Right. And a lot of them are using–you know, financial services businesses use these types of platforms for–to educate–.

Matthew Ley: –Yeah–.

Peter Vamos: –To bring advisors in–.

Matthew Ley: –Continuing education–.

Peter Vamos: –And continued education. But this is also something that not-for-profits employ in–.

Matthew Ley: –Yeah–.

Peter Vamos: –A very similar sort of way.

Matthew Ley: Exactly. I mean, a lot of associations, not–for–profits, NGOs, one of the values that they provide to their audience is targeted learning. And in some cases, it’s just broad-based education. In other cases, it’s actual accreditation. A lot of association professionals, those agents anyways, deliver a lot of accreditation to their audience.

And so, the webinar is a way for them to reach–whether it be you’re in Ontario or a state association or you’re a national, it allows you to reach everyone that–possible with that educational content. And then the other thing that it does, when done right and well, is every webinar on our platform almost are archived and available on-demand.

And we are in an on-demand world. Every dataset in the benchmarks report, every customer that we go through on our quarterly or annual reviews are seeing their on-demand viewership rise. People are viewing them longer and they’re consuming more on-demand content.

And committing to an education-based webinar program, sure, it reaches people–more people than live, but it also now has a value for your members who you’re trying to sign up, new members, is that you’ve got this catalog of 10, 20, hundreds of educational content where they can get all their credits that they needed or some, or they can just learn the things that they need to learn from industry experts.

Peter Vamos: Right. A lot of them as well will–they’ll create events. They’ll do the stuff on the ground–.

Matthew Ley: –Yeah–.

Peter Vamos: –Where they bring members in.

Matthew Ley: Yeah.

Peter Vamos: They bring in experts and provide them with insight. But this really–expanding the reach of this thing–.

Matthew Ley: –Yeah–.

Peter Vamos: –Expanding the reach of their events really becomes part of the driver as well, right?

Matthew Ley: Yeah. And so, when, you know, like anybody, your ticket sales are down is usually when people start thinking about going and broadcasting their event.

But you’re right. A lot of annual conferences will have an educational component to it. They’ll bring in people that they may not have in their webinar program, the big guns. Their budget’s for the annual conference. They want to make it as big as possible. And in many cases, it’s–the highlight of being a member of a certain organization is going to that annual conference, rubbing shoulders with your peers that you don’t normally see, and reaching some of these thought leaders, experts, or whatever it might be.

And so, what–this is actually a place where we usually get introduced as a webcast, premium sort of virtual event provider to our not-for-profit customers, is they’re coming and looking at how do they expand the reach of that physical conference. They might already do webinars on, like, a meeting tool or something, but this is where they first come and talk to us.

And I got a story, an old one, TESL, which is the English–teachers who do English as a second language–.

Peter Vamos: –Um-hmm–.

Matthew Ley: –It’s their association.

Peter Vamos: T-E-S-L.

Matthew Ley: T-E-S-L? Is that what it is? Okay.

Peter Vamos: I don’t know.

Matthew Ley: I call them TESL. I don’t know.

So, TESL, unique situation where they had this big annual conference with lots of learning opportunities. In fact, if you went to the annual conference, you could get your entire sort of recertification done in–if you went to all the sessions, in that three days.

But at the time, and I don’t know if it’s changed because this is–you know, I wouldn’t say a decade ago, but probably seven or eight years ago, TESL or English second–ESL teachers didn’t earn that much. Getting everyone from the outskirts into Toronto was a struggle, so they would apply for grants from I guess the government or their–or the regional school board to pay for them to come in. So, they had a lot of funded people coming in. It was a very large conference. But they had thousands of these teachers who weren’t being reached, and they needed to have this content if they were going to achieve their accreditation.

So, what we did is we just recorded all the sessions in all these different rooms. Put a camera in each room, recorded all the sessions, and then we put them online so that there was 50 hours available every year. And those new 50 hours, teachers would go to this thing for free, go in and they’d watch their 50 hours in the course of the time that they needed, and that ensured that they didn’t need to spend a cent and they were able to get their hours in for continuing education.

So, there’s a lot of great content that happens at conferences. And beyond, you know, expanding out live, hybrid event, which we talk about a lot, just capturing it and then making it available online can be very valuable to your members as well.

Peter Vamos: Right, right.

We do–you know, one of the organizations that we do a lot of work with is Autism Ontario.

Matthew Ley: Yeah.

Peter Vamos: And you’re personally involved in that. You act as the moderator, as the emcee.

Matthew Ley: Um-hmm.

Peter Vamos: I think that’s a good opportunity to put a lot of, you know, meat on the bones in terms of how a platform can be used for an organization like that.

Matthew Ley: Yeah.

Peter Vamos: Let’s talk a little bit about that.

Matthew Ley: So, they’re slightly different in that they have a mandate from the government and funding from the government to basically reach as many people in Ontario with education around autism.

And they do many things. If you don’t know, they’re an amazing organization. And I do this because I think that the work they do is great. And I’ve been personally touched by someone in my family being diagnosed with autism. And so–but they hold training sessions. They hold in-person events.

But it is very Toronto centric, right? That’s where the experts are. Where the resources are, unfortunately, is in Toronto. And so, getting the–these educational resources out, the webinar program was invented many years ago.

Peter Vamos: Um-hmm.

Matthew Ley: And what has happened is that, because the webinars are able to reach Ontario and actually beyond, that they’re so easily accessible by people, is that–and the tracking is so good on it, meaning that we know–people sign in. They give a lot of information on who they are so they can be categorized. We know how long they view the session for, is that they’re able to engage with so many more people this way. It gets their numbers up.

And when the government sees this, they’re like, okay, now this is working. Well, here’s some more money. Bring in more speakers, do more webinars, ’cause this is working and it’s reaching the numbers that we want to reach. We can put our dollars to–sort of to good use.

Peter Vamos: Right.

Matthew Ley: So, it’s been a super successful program. And it’s–you know, they can get as much as 600, 700 people, tons of questions coming in. It’s information that people generally want. It’s done well. But it’s a great exercise in how to do outreach education to sort of the general public through the medium when you are in that government funded sort of situation.

Peter Vamos: Right.

Matthew Ley: There’s one other inherent value of it, is that there’s a level–even though your name and stuff is in there, you’re not walking to a place, raising your hand, talking about your son, child, someone you work with. You’re able to enter a question in and we respond to it anonymously, which is what mostly happens. We have a person on the phone–on the line or on the web who asked this question. So, it can let people inch their way into your programs without actually having to show up in person as well–.

Peter Vamos: –Right–.

Matthew Ley: –Which works as well.

Peter Vamos: Right, where there may be some sensitivity–.

Matthew Ley: –Yeah–.

Peter Vamos: –In terms of the questions you’re asking.

It also, I guess, works–you know, the government is–has talked changes in legislation–.

Matthew Ley: –Yeah–.

Peter Vamos: –Around various things. Autism is, you know, obviously the concern for folks dealing with children with autism. When there are changes in legislation, it allows them to create a public forum in order to discuss these things and actually talk about the changes in legislation.

Matthew Ley: Yeah, stakeholdering sessions.

Peter Vamos: Yeah.

Matthew Ley: We’ve done a lot of that. We do it with–usually it’s a–it’s like autism or the Ontario Power Authority or the electronic recyclers or whatever it might be. It’s a group that’s, you know, involved in the implementation of new legislation or changes in legislation that come to us for this.

But we’ve done a high volume of these sort of public style events where they can’t stakeholder physically because they can’t reach enough people. And so, they moved to the web, and it allows people to ask their questions, get the information in a timely fashion, allows them to be kept up to date throughout a program.

Green energy, I mean, we were–when that got launched, those of you who remember the program in Ontario, the McGuinty government program, we were at the OPA. Sometimes we would–when it–things were really getting heated with it, we’d be there for a day and we would do a presentation on the updates. We would answer–they would answer, I don’t know, so many questions. We couldn’t get to all of them. There wasn’t even a mechanism to follow up with these people, so they just booked another one the next day.

Peter Vamos: Um-hmm.

Matthew Ley: And everyone was coming to these hour, two hour long stakeholdering sessions. And it was all being done that way because many of them were sitting, you know, in their offices or at work, and these legislation–this legislation anyways, impacted their job as much as it impacted them personally.

So, it was–it is an effective way of reaching a broad base of people, meeting a number of mandates of making sure information is accessible and making sure they can interact with you.

Peter Vamos: Right. Excellent.

And this isn’t in–you know, we write these questions out, but it goes back to the whole notion of leads generation.

Matthew Ley: Yeah.

Peter Vamos: There is the opportunity to use a platform to–if you’re trying to, like, build your membership–.

Matthew Ley: –Yeah–.

Peter Vamos: –To do your thought leadership, to do that kind of content where you’re engaging with people, tracking their interactions with you, and actually being able to send your membership people out and have conversations, right? That–that’s a natural fit for something like this in an association as well.

Matthew Ley: It’s–I mean, there is a–you know, a funnel that–like a marketing funnel that–you know, I mean, I don’t believe that every not-for-profit looks at it this way–.

Peter Vamos: –Um-hmm–.

Matthew Ley: –But it is. Membership is one of the ways that they get money–is the primary way that they get money.

Peter Vamos: Yeah.

Matthew Ley: And so, first off, there’s awareness. We know that Peter’s association exists. We don’t know much about it. We go to the website. Maybe we come to you when we need something from you, right? We want a piece of information from your–.

Peter Vamos: –Um-hmm–.

Matthew Ley: –Association. Now that we’ve come to you and you’re known to us or whatever, or we can advertise to you, get you into a webinar, now we’ve provided value. Those webinars are almost always educational in nature. Whether they’re stakeholdering events that are talking about the government or they’re like Autism Ontario, educating people on updates in ABA as it relates to autism, you’ve got–now gotten value from us.

You’ve signed up. Many of our forums have CASL double opt-ins to get into a mailing list. It is a great first step into and–well, maybe not first step, probably second step.

Peter Vamos: Um-hmm.

Matthew Ley: Just like a marketer, they might get you with a bit of social media content, a blog, then they want to get you into a webinar to get–to see your level of engagement.

Peter Vamos: Yeah.

Matthew Ley: Now you’re at that level of engagement. That’s the right time to say, hey, here’s the benefits of the membership–.

Peter Vamos: –Yeah–.

Matthew Ley: –Right, at that point in time.

So, there are definitely a lot of–you know, a lot of people–a lot of, you know, not-for-profits, all of us, you know, we knew CASL was coming. We were a little off guard with our full–with our list management and the like. And modernization is a challenge because their focus is not technology. Their focus is helping people. So, this is a easy way of starting to get that in order and help with some of those modernization items.

Peter Vamos: Right. Great.

So, in terms of tips that you can provide for not-for-profits that are looking to move into webinars and virtual events–.

Matthew Ley: –Yeah–.

Peter Vamos: –What–like, what would you say? You know, what are the best kinds of tips and tricks that–or tips, really, both from a–.

Matthew Ley: –For moving into it?

Peter Vamos: For moving into it.

Matthew Ley: So, don’t make it–so, don’t–I mean, I’d don’t want to say don’t. But if you’re going to go to virtual events, like everyone, when it’s an afterthought, it’s going to be looked at as such, meaning you realize you’re not going to get people in the room with you and so you decide to do a webcast or you do a virtual just because it’s going to have that effect on people, and it won’t be as powerful.

You’re all doing it right now, and I don’t know what you’re doing with. But get your recordings, all of them, anything you’ve done that is still relevant, and get it on your website. Get it off YouTube. Or if it’s on YouTube, put it on–embed it in your website, but I would say get it off of the YouTube in the free area.

Keep it with the rest of your information and your calls to action from membership signing up or whatever it is even if you’re not tracking this, which you should be, because it’s going to be–it’s going towards your metrics, help you drive new members, go to the government if you’re getting funding, is that–get it on your website. Make sure that they’re seeing your whole message and they know to come back to you for the–for this content.

And for many who might be listening to this, it’s find a partner or a platform that works. So, if you’ve got somebody in your organization who is proficient in webinars and knows what they are doing and can run them for you, that’s great. But you don’t want fear of technology to be an issue. And sometimes that means when not-for-profits come in, they actually choose and have to choose a more expensive service offering like ours, or one like ours that can be full service and can assist them.

And that comes with the fact that, you know, you’re making this investment. You’re wanting to do this. And your membership is already saying we don’t have a lot of engagement. This is virtual. It’s not like when I’m in person with you or whatever. And so, you want to make sure that it’s good and that it gets you the outcomes that you need, right?

So, it’s a–and we understand that it is a function of budget. We understand that. But in some cases, it is a good sort of gateway in is working with somebody who’s been there before. And that’s because, you know, we’ve been there before, but we’ve–we–even if we–you went to somebody else who didn’t have our experience, at least they’ve been there before to make sure that it’s a–it’s going to work flawlessly and your audience is going to have a good example, and then you can transition it.

Peter Vamos: Right. Right.

Matthew Ley: There are a couple things that we didn’t talk about that I’d like to talk about, if you don’t mind, because I think that they’re a bit–.

Peter Vamos: –Of course–.

Matthew Ley: –It’s a bit of gold. And first of all, one point I had written down here about modernization which I think is important is that this is a medium by which you now have people logging in to you on the web, right?

And if you’re struggling, like a lot of people are, with overall modernization, meaning, you know, getting people to follow on your social media, or you’ve created this great campaign for fundraising, or for–Canadian Cancer Society. They have got a forum that–I don’t know if it’s still live, but it was three or four years ago when I started working with them where they connect cancer survivors with recently diagnosed people who have a similar cancer and are going through a similar path, similar age demos or whatever, so that they can have a virtual mentor, someone they can ask questions about, “Did you experience this,” and really create a camaraderie as they go through the stages of treatment and recovery.

And so, what we suggested that they do is–they’re giving this webinar that everyone is sort of tuning into, is make a call to action on the webinar signing up for that because they needed to get people into it. Similar to if Facebook is your big strategy for the year, people may or may not pay attention to that. Talk about it. Put it on the webinar. Now these people can at least hear from you that you are–can now hear from you that you have this focus on information being–going through your Facebook, and there’s a value in you actually coming in and connecting to the Facebook page.

So, because they’re there and they can click, it’s a great way of getting people into other aspects of your technical or your digital renaissance, conversion, whatever it is that you are trying to do.

Peter Vamos: Right.

Matthew Ley: And then the last one was for the nonbelievers.

Peter Vamos: Um-hmm.

Matthew Ley: And I’m sorry. I’m just talking now, but I wanted to share.

Peter Vamos: No, no, no. You want to cover the stuff you want to cover.

Matthew Ley: Yeah.

Peter Vamos: And this–you’re come prepared. That’s good.

Matthew Ley: So, there are still nonbelievers out there. I can’t believe it. There are still people who come to this and say, you know, we do webinars because we have to, not webinars because we want to. In a perfect world, we would be out in front of people, or we don’t think that webinars, you know, kind of work, and we’re going to focus all of our attention on Instagram or social or whatever it might be. And that’s completely cool. You can only do so much stuff.

But the argument for why webinars work in this space is that, just like some of the concepts that we talk about on this podcast that we cannot articulate in a tweet or in a 30 second video, is that some of the things that you need to talk to your membership about are complex, and they need the person to invest time with you.

An example of this, and we’ve done this a number of times as we’ve started to work with associations, is you’ve got a program for your members where they are able to get, you know, reduced costs on printing or whatever it might be. And as an association, this is a revenue generator for you because you get a little kickback from the–not kickback, but a commission, if you will, from the vendor if your people sign on. So, they get a benefit of cheaper. You get a benefit of dollars.

And people don’t use them. They go out and they search and they Google on their own because they don’t understand how it all works, that there’s two benefits to doing this. And so, we’ve done national webinars, if you will, or broadcasts that are basically just articulating to the audience these are the programs we’ve recently launched. These are the new ones. This is why it’s better for you than it is for anybody else. This is why you should check here. This is a–this is one of the values of membership. Then that’s a simple idea.

Peter Vamos: Um-hmm.

Matthew Ley: Imagine you’re, you know, talking about, you know, how to make use of the changes in government funding, or you’re talking about massive changes in your organizational structure. Sure, you can send out a letter or a newsletter, a letter from the CEO or the executive director, and some people may in fact read it. But there’s a reason why the CEOs of multinational corporations don’t send out a letter to their staff telling them that–why they are cutting offices or changing what they’re doing and they get on an event like this and they speak to them openly and honestly. It’s because that’s the way of conveying a message like that.

Peter Vamos: Right.

Matthew Ley: And so, it’s a powerful medium for education, but it’s also a powerful medium to communicate these complex messages to people that you’re not getting.

Peter Vamos: Personalize and humanize the message.

Matthew Ley: Exactly. Exactly.

Peter Vamos: Great.

Is that it? Have you covered everything?

Matthew Ley: I think so.

Peter Vamos: You think so?

Matthew Ley: I kind of lost track.

Peter Vamos: Okay.

Matthew Ley: I think so.

Peter Vamos: Good, good. No, this–I mean, listen, I think this is one of those things that–we talk a lot about–.

Matthew Ley: –Yeah–.

Peter Vamos: –Financial services. We talk about, you know, how law firms can use the platform. This is a huge advantage to associations, not-for-profits, so it’s great that we’ve dug into this a little.

Matthew Ley: And if–and the funny thing about it–not funny, but as we do these–every time we go to verticalize or focus on something unique in this, it’s like I’m sure that if there’s any marketers who tuned in today and decided to stay because they were interested in the topic will see that anything that resonates for an internal communicator, a marketer, or a–or even in this case it’s not-for-profits, is that there’s always similarities. And I’m just taking the concepts and spinning them slightly differently.

Peter Vamos: Right.

Matthew Ley: You know what I mean? Like, on-demand is still value for everyone ’cause that’s the trends in the world.

Peter Vamos: Yeah.

Matthew Ley: Video adds–is more human and it offers a way of getting a message out in a different way ’cause that’s what’s going on in the world. And it’s just a function of understanding where it fits in these places that is the only difference. But–it’s highly nuanced, but really we’re saying the same thing over and over every week.

Last time, on “Lessons From The Front Line”, we discussed Simulive Webinars and the different tools that will increase your leads and hit your Market Qualified Lead goals. In this episode, we dive into the challenges behind the creation of inspiring virtual events that both live and digital audiences can engage with.

Find out how to boost your content and increase audience interest. Both in-house and remote. Regardless of the type of webinar your host, there needs to be a level of excitement and anticipation resonating with your audience.

Tune in for the following topics:

How to create webinars that inspire engagement from your audience? There are so many creative methods behind hosting an interactive and engaging virtual event. From SportsCentre style to game show strategy. But how do we improve our set-up from the original one-way broadcast to an enjoyable, interactive event?

How do you pull off a successful hybrid live/virtual event? Most virtual audiences will feel secondary, but that’s entirely preventable. What can you offer your guests that gives them the opportunity to feel recognized as a primary audience during virtual events?

Distance networking. A big challenge to broadcasting over multiple regions, is making participants feel like they are all together in the experience. We cover useful strategies and a unique success story to show you how to attain this.

Location inspiration. This is essential when considering ways to improve your webinar strategies. We touch on ways to get creative with your virtual event’s location to increase the level of authenticity. Especially when using video.

What will carry over during the next couple of years? Find out how segmented media, video and tech networking events will quickly become the method behind the ability for everybody to participate.

Stay tuned for our next podcast covering not-for-profits and how these associations can use webinars and virtual events to their fullest potential.

The Complete Transcript On Inspiring Virtual Events

Peter Vamos: Welcome to LFTF, the podcast about turning your webinar into a lead generation machine and advancing your business objectives. With me as usual, Matthew Ley, the president of The Streaming Network. Welcome.

Matthew Ley: Thanks for having me, Pete. And is that yet another tagline that you’ve added to our–?

Peter Vamos: –It’s–I think this is the one we’re going to stick with.

Matthew Ley: Okay, this is the one.

Peter Vamos: This is the one. You–.

Matthew Ley: –You’ve said that for, like, 30 podcasts–

Peter Vamos: –I know–

Matthew Ley: –In a row, but okay. All right.

Peter Vamos: You can hold me to that.

Matthew Ley: All right.

Peter Vamos: So, we talk a lot about technology. We talk a lot about interactive features to make webinars more engaging. But today we’re looking at ways to give your audience more inspiration and what they can do with their next virtual event. There are different types of virtual events–.

Matthew Ley: –Yeah–.

Peter Vamos: –Different types of webinars. How do we want to tackle the subject today?

Matthew Ley: Well, I think that what I’m going to try and do is I’m going to try and break it down into things they–we can do for an internal event versus an external.

Peter Vamos: Right.

Matthew Ley: So, when you’re talking about an internal training event or an internal audience–or, sorry, employee engagement event like a town hall or a CEO road show, you can have more fun with it, I think.

Our audience is used to seeing that in their physical events. You can play with music and themes that you would never do with an external-facing webinar because it’s only going to be seen by your employees. Also, there’s no commercial intent, so you could use music that you maybe couldn’t use in a–in an external event and different things like that.

So, internal, you can have a lot more fun, and we do see a lot more fun being done in those. External, you got to keep it a little safer. You know, it can be seen by the media or anybody else, but it doesn’t mean it has to be boring. I think we’ve talked about that a lot on here. But I will separate the two when I give my examples and I talk about what I’ve seen work and not work.

Peter Vamos: Right. Fair. And those two audiences come for different reasons as well, right?

Matthew Ley: Yeah, and that’s important. I mean, on the webinar, you know, you are promoting this to an audience who doesn’t have to be there. Whatever you’ve done in your promotion, whether it’s you’ve picked a topic that they really like or you’ve done a great job in your past webinars, they’re coming to see it ’cause they want to.

The internal audience, on the other hand, have to go. It’s mandatory training. It’s the CEO is talking and it’s an all hands meeting. It’s mandatory everyone be there. And so, when it comes to that, you have a very different mentality going in, is that everyone’s going in with a negative idea. I have to do this silly thing. I want to get my work done. I was going to leave early. It’s Friday before the long weekend. I want to get out there and enjoy the sunshine, but I got to listen to my CEO talk.

Peter Vamos: Right.

Matthew Ley: And so, that’s why I think even–in many cases, more attention needs to be put on the fun factor of those events to turn people’s idea around.

Peter Vamos: Right.

Matthew Ley: A great event producer that I was doing work with at one point in time named Tim Ferguson, he was–I’m not sure where he is now, but I think he’s in Europe, but he was running audience here in Toronto for a while–said that the goal of any internal event, especially like a sales kickoff, should be that the event is so good that the audience would actually pay money to come next time.

Peter Vamos: Right.

Matthew Ley: And I would suggest that the goal of any virtual event for internal should be that the virtual experience is so good that people who were sitting in the room with the CEO feel left out that it wasn’t as good for them because they were–they had to be in an audience and they didn’t get to do this from their desk or their office or their pajamas at home.

Peter Vamos: Right. And it’s show business, really. I mean, you’re–even if it’s a corporate event, you’re still–it’s–you’re putting on a show, right?

Matthew Ley: Yeah.

Peter Vamos: You’ve got to put on a show.

So, what are some–you know, we’re talking about tips and tricks.

Matthew Ley: Yeah.

Peter Vamos: What are some things that work regardless of whether it’s internal or external audience?

Matthew Ley: Well, you stole some of my thunder when you started talking about how it has to be a show–.

Peter Vamos: –It has–.

Matthew Ley: –Show business, because, I mean, we talk about that all the time on this–.

Peter Vamos: –Right–.

Matthew Ley: –Show, is that you want to try and create a show format–.

Peter Vamos: –Um-hmm–.

Matthew Ley: –Right? And that show format needs to be relatable to your audience and needs to be something that they understand what’s going to be happening so–when they come back the next time. And a show or show business, as you put it, is something that can get people moderately excited about some of the topics we discuss on a day-to-day basis.

So, when you look back at an internal, right, you know, what gets your juices running is not, oh, we’ve got a national Webex session happening this week. It’s going to be awesome, this national webinar.

Peter Vamos: So excited for the–.

Matthew Ley: –I–.

Peter Vamos: –Webex–.

Matthew Ley: –Know, and I’m–beyond the fact that often when I’m involved in this, it’s never on a Webex, right? It’s on our webcast webinar platform, but people still use it like Kleenex.

Peter Vamos: Yeah.

Matthew Ley: And that’s not exciting. For that matter, neither is a CEO town hall or a all hands meeting or whatever it might be.

Peter Vamos: Yeah.

Matthew Ley: And so, let’s just even start with the fact that let’s change the title of these events, as a beginning. And then often with anything, and the marketers understand this best, is that, you know, the title and the promise of the event needs to fulfill what you say it’s going to.

So, an example of one that worked really, really well was a program that we ran for years until he retired at Hydro One, which was a show called Live with Len. So, Len McMillan ran the front–the staff that was out in the field for Hydro One. And they were the folks that, back before smart meters, they would go and they would read your meter and do the report for your bill. They were also the ones that would clean up debris around different sites. There’s a number of field operatives. There’s a forestry division and all of that.

And as they were getting ready for smart metering to come in, his portfolio was growing in the number of people, but also there was a lot of anxiety about who was going to have a job and where people were going to transition. And he was getting so many questions, and he couldn’t be out in the field as much because he had to be in boardrooms discussing the future of the organization, so he simply could not answer these questions, and people were trying to get access to him.

So, they created a program, we called it Live with Len, where he sat in a chair, he gave very few prepared remarks, and then he just answered questions. And me, you know, the virtual event expert, even though this was, like, 10 years ago and I was just getting started, I said “Bad idea.” People don’t like asking questions on virtual events. And, I mean, if we’re honest, you’re going to get questions that you’re probably not going to want to answer.

And in the five minutes that I got to meet with Len, I realized that this was going to be different, because he walked in the room and he said I don’t care. You know, I’ll say any–I’ll answer any question. I’m not going to take any bullshit. And I need to get these guys these answers because they’re worried about their families. They’re worried about their jobs.

And so, he sat in a chair, said three or four things, and the questions flew in. And he answered everything in a very authentic way like he said he would, even saying I’m not going to answer that question ’cause you know I can’t. You’re asking it. You keep asking it, and I will–I can’t let you know that until we know as a company. But as soon as I do, I’m going to let you know.

And it’s the only program I ever did that was exactly like that. It probably would not have worked with the CEO of Hydro One at the time. It worked with Len. It may not be something that would work even today with the way things can leak and get out, but it worked. And it’s the only show I ever did where I could walk around and someone would say, yeah, I worked for Hydro One, or it was a summer job with Hydro One. And I could say remember Live with Len? And they said yeah, I loved that show. I produced that show. So, it was a show that, you know, really, really worked.

Peter Vamos: Right. And the lesson there really is build it around what you’ve got, right?

Matthew Ley: That’s right.

Peter Vamos: Play to your strengths.

Matthew Ley: Exactly.

Peter Vamos: You’ve got Len.

Matthew Ley: Um-hmm.

Peter Vamos: You–but most companies don’t have a Len, so you got to create other things. There was, I remember–and we’ve talked about this in the past. There’s the ping pong–HubSpot’s ping pong ball.

Matthew Ley: Right.

Peter Vamos: Tell us a little bit about–.

Matthew Ley: –And–so, that’s a good example when you start going external.

Peter Vamos: Yeah.

Matthew Ley: And that was a group that was already having fun–.

Peter Vamos: –Um-hmm–.

Matthew Ley: –Kind of like we started by having fun when we were in your basement set.

Peter Vamos: Yeah.

Matthew Ley: And then since then, we’ve done the fireplace. We’ve done the one in the bar. Like, we’ve done this, and what we’re trying to do is just have fun with it because we–.

Peter Vamos: –Change it up.

Matthew Ley: Yeah, because we can, right?

Peter Vamos: Yeah.

Matthew Ley: We got a studio. We got all these guys and we’re–so we’re–.

Peter Vamos: –We have a large bongo drum here today.

Matthew Ley: Yes.

Peter Vamos: We’re going to play it later on for you.

Matthew Ley: Yes, this is not our new set. This is a set that was used yesterday for somebody else, and we decided, heck, let’s just take it. It looks kind of sophisticated, more sophisticated than the two of us, so we thought we would take it.

Peter Vamos: It’s going to outshine us.

Matthew Ley: Yeah.

But what was I saying? So, that HubSpot one is a great example of an external audience. And it works for them, and it might not work for all of you.

So, it was an external-facing event, and they were already–HubSpot’s a fun, hip, cool group. And the speakers they have on are–a lot of them are external thought leaders. And they’re of a modern marketing–that whole scene. And so, they were already having fun on their webinars, and they wanted to amp it up.

So, they did a program–we’ve talked about it on the show–where they analyze people’s websites live and really tear apart websites that are–have bad inbound strategies at play.

Peter Vamos: Um-hmm.

Matthew Ley: And they would do 10 minutes per website, but they would not give the experts a clock. They were just going and trying to get to the end of the 10 minutes. And when the 10 minutes ended, boom, they got hit with a ping pong ball.

They started with a football. Apparently people got scared so they moved to a ping pong ball. And there was a person selling–sending a ping pong ball throughout to give them the warning that the time was up. Very fun, people loved it, great successful program, and it worked for that brand.

Peter Vamos: Right.

Matthew Ley: Right.

Peter Vamos: And it keeps things tight, which is also important, right?

Matthew Ley: Yeah.

Peter Vamos: You don’t want people going–if you–.

Matthew Ley: –Oh–.

Peter Vamos: –Go over, right?

Matthew Ley: Yeah, it had multiple strategies–.

Peter Vamos: –Yeah–.

Matthew Ley: –Employed in it–.

Peter Vamos: –Yeah–.

Matthew Ley: –That worked really well.

Peter Vamos: Yeah.

Matthew Ley: There was no production value. It was just like a GoPro or a webcam maybe that was just down on a table, and it was just a bunch of guys rapping.

Now, compare that to a webinar that I think is still on our website, ’cause I was so proud of it for so long, called the Beat the Clock Challenge, where Demand Metric came in and they basically had a bunch of questions from their community. They had launched a community. I was the webinar expert in the community. And they had all these questions that had been put in about what to do–when to hold a webinar, what’s the best time, why do you do this, when to do that.

And me and John, as much as John and I–the CMO there are–have worked together for a very long time, we haven’t been on a set as much as you and I have. And so, he was–he wasn’t comfortable with the–as comfortable with the environment as I was, and me and him didn’t have the rapport. Things were much more scripted.

But we wanted to do something fun, so we called it a beat the clock challenge. And literally, he gave me either two minutes or 45 seconds to give an answer. And if I went over, someone honked a horn–.

Peter Vamos: –Right–.

Matthew Ley: –Out in the other room, and that told me that my time was up. So, it allowed us to stay in a wheelhouse that we were comfortable in, made me–made us laugh and get out of our comfort zone to a certain extent ’cause this horn was awful. But it was a way of doing something similar in an environment where we weren’t quite as maybe free and open as they are at HubSpot.

Peter Vamos: Right, right. But it still gave you–created a level of excitement in you, created a level of anticipation in the audience, and still–.

Matthew Ley: –Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it’s something that I always said that, you know, I should do again–.

Peter Vamos: –Yeah–.

Matthew Ley: –If I had that many sort of questions.

Peter Vamos: Maybe for our next podcast.

Matthew Ley: Yeah, maybe.

But, like, just going back to internal for one second, and that is, you know, there’s a lot of inspiration that you can take from programs that you’ve watched. So, when we go external, we look at–we always say look at podcasts for audio events. Look at news broadcasts for format. One plus two guests, you know, remote hits, whatever it might be, we’ve done that to the end.

But for internal, you can do a lot of fun. And when you start thinking, your mind is going to go to formats that you’ve seen before, like the fireside chat–.

Peter Vamos: –Um-hmm–.

Matthew Ley: –Invented by FDR as a radio address to the nation; worked because it was the only time that a president had just sat there and spoke to the nation in the way that FDR did.

Trust me, it’s been done, and it’s not going to work for your next internal event unless you really go for it and you put on, you know, a smoking jacket and you make it like it’s in a basement. Then that might be funny. But one guy sitting there just kind of talking like that isn’t going to play very well, virtual or otherwise.

But some things that I’ve seen work really well are I’ve seen people go full on SportsCenter. So, they’re doing a quarterly update, and rather than doing it just people talking, they’re giving the numbers to the sales team and they’re doing it like they’re two people on a news desk. And they’ve got graphics. They’ve done whatever.

I’ve seen it work well in training and learning activities where they’ve done like a game show, Family Feud, one region versus another, or a Jeopardy challenge or something like that. So, anything that is a show format that has a little bit of fun in it is something that can be related to an internal event.

We did a–this is a great example of the use of the technology and something that people may not think about, is a lot of companies do some amazing things that we don’t know, right? Like, Wal-Mart had a challenge for university students where they had to come up with a green-friendly business idea that would help retail become more green.

And they did it like a competition. And they would come up, and it was like Dragon’s Den. They would make a pitch, and they had the chief environment responsibility officer or chief I think–that’s not the name of it, but you get what I’m talking about–.

Peter Vamos: –Um-hmm–.

Matthew Ley: –And a few other sort of experts in the field sit on it while these kids came up and they did their 15 minute pitches or 10 minute pitches and got questions asked of them.

Well, you know, Wal-Mart doesn’t–I mean, Wal-Mart’s a big bad company, you know, killing small retail. Now they’re getting killed by Amazon. But at the time, you know, not a lot of people knew that they were doing these great things, right? And so, by doing it virtually as well, they even let the virtual audience–they could vote, but their votes didn’t count. It was the panel that counted.

Peter Vamos: Right.

Matthew Ley: But they got to go out to all of the universities and all of that to realize that Wal-Mart was caring about creating a more sustainable future. It was–chief sustainability officer–.

Peter Vamos: –Right–.

Matthew Ley: –Was her role.

Peter Vamos: Right.

Matthew Ley: And so, basically that event got them a lot of eyes, a lot of publicity, followed that kind of Dragon’s Den–y approach. And, you know, when they gave away $100,000 as a business–so, a startup investment to these kids that came up with this idea, you know, that was a–really a pretty amazing a-ha moment for that event.

Peter Vamos: Right.

Matthew Ley: So, that–those are ways that you can take a standard idea and move it to something that’s a little more fun and a little more like a show.

Peter Vamos: And in the process potentially redefine yourself, if that’s the goal, right?

Matthew Ley: And if you’re not going to decide to go straight webinar, bring them into a studio like this or do it from an office and everyone else is somewhere else, you’re always going to have that hybrid audience.

And I think that the biggest mistake, and again, we’ve talked at length about this on this show, is to–the virtual audience already feels like they’re secondary. And in many cases, they are. In many cases, they are an afterthought by the event organizers.

They held an event that’s going to be somewhere. They realized we’re not going to reach this audience in North Bay or in Vancouver, a Toronto-centric sort of company. And so, we’re going to have to do a webcast of it so we can reach those guys that can’t be here. Well, they already are going into this feeling that way ’cause they know where the head office is.

They know the CEO sits in Toronto. They know that Toronto has the conferences that they can’t go to. They get that because they’re not in this region. We forget that ’cause we live here and everything’s available–.

Peter Vamos: –Um-hmm–.

Matthew Ley: –And we can make those decisions ourselves. So, you really want to figure out a way of having this event feel like they’re–not only are they not an afterthought, that it’s better for them than it is for the people in the room.

And so, a great example of this for marketers is the Advocamp event. And at Advocamp, they basically had an in-person audience that was here in Toronto, which was a small fraction of everyone who was going to–who could attend. And that–those people got access to a tradeshow floor, a bunch of the executives, shake hands and talk, and one track in a main room, whereas the virtual audience got access to that main track in the main room, three additional tracks that were done over virtual webinars, prerecorded, simulated live or on-demand or whatever it might be, and they even got little interviews with the people that were talking on the main stage afterwards on a–and they actually did a–not a fireside chat, I couldn’t call it that, like a campground chat where they sat down in some Adirondack chairs and talked about what just happened on stage and why it was important.

The virtual audience had four times the amount of access and content as the in-person audience had. And the in-person audience got this later in the follow up, but really this event was–made the virtual audience feel like they were the primary–.

Peter Vamos: –Right–.

Matthew Ley: –And that the people in person were just filling seats.

Peter Vamos: Right.

Matthew Ley: And so, because it’s virtual, you have an opportunity to give them more, do it. You are not going to isolate that in-person audience. They are there for a specific reason. They like your event. They like you, or they sit with the CEO in the main room and they’re kind of forced to do that.

Peter Vamos: Right. It gives people–I guess when they’re there, it gives them a closeness, but really it does gives you–give you the opportunity to turn that perception around, right–?

Matthew Ley: –That’s right–.

Peter Vamos: –That you were secondary–.

Matthew Ley: –Yeah–.

Peter Vamos: –People, and in fact really articulate the importance of–and that’s something that companies around the world struggle with, right, doing these sorts of things.

When you’re doing a global event across multiple locations–.

Matthew Ley: –Yeah–.

Peter Vamos: –Across multiple regions like–so what should you be focusing on? What are the areas that you need to be cognizant of?

Matthew Ley: Well, if you’ve got multiple locations where you’ve got multiple people that are physically in a room somewhere, like they’re watching on a screen in a boardroom or a conference facility, or sometimes we–in pharma, we see them in restaurants watching these things, and you’ve got a big audience in one location too, it’s basically–it’s hard to make everyone feel like they’re part of the same experience–.

Peter Vamos: –Um-hmm–.

Matthew Ley: –Because everyone’s got a different one. Some guy’s at home watching on his laptop. Other guy’s in a restaurant. Someone’s at a conference facility. So, trying to pull your virtual and your in-person audience together, or make everyone feel like they’re part of the same event is a–is something that makes the events that much more impactful for anyone.

So, years ago, when it was slides on the internet and audio on a phone–I am that old–I was, air quotes, producing a divisional town hall at PwC. We did–each division did these. We booked these big conference calls and we did slides. And there was a room in Toronto where a bunch of people went and watched it happen, and then everyone else got into boardrooms that were part of the division elsewhere.

And one guy was–I think he was getting like a 50 year pin or he was getting award or something, or he won an award. I don’t know what it was. But at one point in time, they’re in Toronto and they say now we’re going to go to Vancouver because we’ve got someone in Vancouver that accomplished something or whatever. And in Vancouver, they pressed un-mute on the phone. And at that same time, unbeknownst to them, the CEO was in Vancouver for other meetings. He walked in and presented this guy with an award.

Peter Vamos: Oh, great.

Matthew Ley: Yeah, it was great. And no one knew what was going on because it wasn’t like this guy was talking. The speakerphone was open, and there was, oh, my God, it’s the–and then there was applause and there was all of this stuff. And even though we couldn’t see it–which is a lot easier to do now.

Peter Vamos: Yeah.

Matthew Ley: Back then, that was just mind blowing, right, video on the Internet. We couldn’t see it. There was that excitement and that whatever, and then they put his picture up on a slide. And it was–there was all kinds of–you know, a lot of–a lot came along with that. So, that’s years ago.

Peter Vamos: Um-hmm.

Matthew Ley: But that idea of mixing what’s going on in all these locations and letting people kind of feel like it’s one day only and they’re all in it together is very important for these virtual events.

And I’ll give you an example now of a external brand launch. It was for a pharmaceutical company where we really–they bought in, right? It was an RFP. And we won the RFP, I think, because we knew this part of it and they bought into it. And they ended up going with two strategies.

One was they had viewing parties across the country. Viewing parties? They had viewing sessions–they weren’t supposed to be parties–across the country in different conference rooms and that sort of thing. And they had a facilitator in each room, so like a doctor advocate in the room. And they did a bunch of presentations in the main room in Mississauga. And at one point, they decided that they wanted to show that this was an actual event, so they wanted to bring everybody in over video.

And the execution there was expensive at the time. They were risk-averse, so they didn’t want to use Skype. This was years ago, so there was concerns about–you know, stuff we can do now is even easier than it was three years ago.

Peter Vamos: Right.

Matthew Ley: So–.

Peter Vamos: –But the stability of the–.

Matthew Ley: –Yeah–.

Peter Vamos: –Feed and–.

Matthew Ley: –Stability of feed, even just the fear of that type Skype. Like, you know, Microsoft owns it now. It was not owned by anyone then.

Peter Vamos: Right.

Matthew Ley: Right?

Peter Vamos: Right, right.

Matthew Ley: There’s, like, fear of that. So, we had to install Internet–dedicated Internet in each of these venues, and then we had to install videoconferencing units for the day. And we didn’t get access to the venues until the morning of the event, so we were pulling our hair out testing and whatever, just trying to get this, and what turned into a–basically a wave of a guy at a podium and introducing his name and how great it is to be a part of the event, and that was it.

Peter Vamos: Right.

Matthew Ley: So, the execution on the far end wasn’t great because having him on was nothing more than just to prove that we had events going on.

But on the same event, we did a–we wanted to get the audience engaging, so we did a thing where we used a product called ScribbleLive, which is a Toronto-based technology company that we had worked with a bunch in the past. And we did a closed–almost like a social media feed, where we allowed everyone in the room to go to a link, login, they were approved, and then they were able to post photos, comments, and all of that. And the people that were online were able to do the same thing.

In a weird thing happened as people logged in for the 45 minute or so that they were there eating and getting ready to go, is that people started taking photos of food that was being served, the wine, the venue, and comparing who had a better experience, Vancouver or Toronto. And although it was not the intention to have anyone brag about that, it then started to have people see that they knew other people, other doctors, other people that they knew, and they started sending messages to one another.

And by the time the event started, everyone was sending messages in for questions, comments, making comments like, oh, I love your tie to the speaker and all of that stuff. So, we got that engagement going, no testing required.

Peter Vamos: Right.

Matthew Ley: It was a pretty simple and easy thing. And that was a way that everyone felt like, on that day, they were part of the same event.

Peter Vamos: Right. And any event is really about creating that social connection.

Matthew Ley: Yeah.

Peter Vamos: I mean, you do–that’s why you bring people together, right?

Matthew Ley: That’s right.

Peter Vamos: You bring them virtually together and have that kind of exchange and interaction with this.

Matthew Ley: And that’s always been the struggle–.

Peter Vamos: –Yeah–.

Matthew Ley: –Both for speakers to connect with their audience and with audience members to connect with one another, is you can’t do that virtually as well.

Peter Vamos: Right.

Matthew Ley: And so, people always feel like that’s why we have to be in person sometimes.

Peter Vamos: Yeah. And you can’t actually even think that. That just happens. And when it happens organically like that, how wonderful.

Matthew Ley: Yeah.

Peter Vamos: It’s really about the audience, right?

Matthew Ley: Yeah.

Peter Vamos: I mean, at the end of the day, like any event, you need the audience to be engaged. Let’s talk a little bit about that.

Matthew Ley: Yeah. So, I mean, we focus so much on the stage so often what we are going to say and how we are going to say it, how we look–.

Peter Vamos: –Um-hmm–.

Matthew Ley: –What it is that we’re going to do that we forget about–we can, at times, forget about the audience. Good–most good internal communications folks or marketers are trying to always think about what the audience is looking for. But from a show, a lot of times people sort of forget that, right?

Peter Vamos: Um-hmm.

Matthew Ley: So, from a simple idea of what’s in it for them when you’re doing a virtual is we did a program many years ago for DL Elliott (sp) that–they were forced to cut budget and do a national Webex session for a leadership day that used to be in person, used to be at a hotel, used to have a lot of fun, booze and all that, going along with it.

And there was a fear that everyone sitting on a Webex for a day was going to be not a very good experience. And we were, you know, fairly early in our career, but I would even have to say, yeah, that’s going to be a terrible experience. And you can’t go from that to that. There’s nothing similar.

Peter Vamos: Um-hmm.

Matthew Ley: So, we did a three to four hour broadcast on national leadership day. There was a bunch that went along with it. It was video. We did I think a CNN–a Larry King set for fun, and we had some prerecorded sessions. But we basically tried to chop it up, and we followed the methodology that people don’t like seeing anything for longer than 20 minutes. We chopped it up into segments, had some games and stuff.

But one of the things that we did was we promoted it like you get to stay home in your pajamas, meaning that even the folks that were in Toronto that could have been at this event, they stayed home.

Peter Vamos: Right.

Matthew Ley: They didn’t come in. And we asked people to send us pics, and that time it was just over email, of them in their pajamas because we were going to have a pajama contest of who had the best sort of set up and the best pajama thing.

So, what worked there is the feedback was we didn’t have to leave our friends and family. We got as much value out of four hours as we get out of the day–or three to four hours as we get out of a day, because it was more jam-packed and we were able to do it. We were able to focus more and there was a lot more takeaways for us.

So, we–that became how they did that event. It started out with a budget concern and now it became this value to them.

Peter Vamos: Right.

Matthew Ley: And so, thinking about them that way is very important.

Another suggestion or idea about the audience is bringing your audience in in the content. And I’ve seen this done both internal and external. I had a company that was doing a brand launch for a product, and they really needed their sales reps on board. They were a retail activation–I think it was tobacco, actually.

And what we did is, when they were going through this new product offering, they brought in sales reps from across the country, sat them in a room and talked them through the idea, why they were doing it, what they thought, and got their feedback. That was recorded.

And when that was recorded, it was–the tidbits that came from the sales reps was used in the virtual event that was promoting that brand launch three months later to the sales reps.

Peter Vamos: Right.

Matthew Ley: So, this idea that, oh, my contemporary, this guy I know as a sales leader, thinks this is a good idea, I think it’s a good idea, helping them get on board.

Peter Vamos: Right.

Matthew Ley: And I then saw it happen through–a lot of people out here will do customer advocacy events or they’ll bring in customers and talk to them about the product roadmap and get their feedback, is recording that and getting, you know, snippets from customers who the prospects really find, you know, respected or whatever it might be, and using their words and then showing, in our product release, we have this product. It came from you, our customers, our prospects. And so, that’s putting the audience into the events.

Peter Vamos: Right.

Matthew Ley: So, that might seem to a lot of you like, oh, my God, that’s three months in advance. That’s a lot of work.

Peter Vamos: It’s risky and–.

Matthew Ley: –A lot of stuff.

Peter Vamos: Yeah.

Matthew Ley: Well, the good thing about it is you record–you don’t do it live.

Peter Vamos: Yeah.

Matthew Ley: You record it and then you pull out the snippets.

Peter Vamos: Yeah.

Matthew Ley: And there is a lot that goes along with it.

But, you know, it could be also as simple as another company that we know started to pull employees in to be the emcee of their event. They weren’t the host. They weren’t doing as much as you’re doing here. But they would get up and announce the next segment and do whatever. And they were like a front-line junior staff member that was asked to do this, just pulling this idea that there is more interaction or involvement.

I was talking to our events lead this morning, Bryan Squire, and I didn’t even know this, but apparently at Magna International at their AGM, they do an innovation segment. And they don’t have the VPs of the departments present what they’re doing from an innovation, they have an engineer or a front-line person do it too, bringing those people to the forefront and getting people internal, external more excited about what’s going on at the company. So, getting your audience involved beyond Q&A is a valuable idea.

Peter Vamos: Right. Right, right, right. I mean, I think it’s great too because it really does create, you know, potentially rising stars within the company–.

Matthew Ley: –Yeah–.

Peter Vamos: –Right? People are throwing ideas around, all of a sudden you just go, oh, and–or this person’s really comfortable in the camera. We should maybe feature that person a little bit more.

Matthew Ley: Well, I know we always say it as the VP giving the thing or me or you or whoever it is. But in the end, you know, often–we know this from popular culture. Like, with Ronald Reagan, it wasn’t as much the message as it was the delivery.

Peter Vamos: Um-hmm.

Matthew Ley: And if you can get someone you’re shocked by, by this person’s great at delivering a message that has not landed when it was given by even the most senior leader of the company–.

Peter Vamos: –Yeah–.

Matthew Ley: –That–that’s a better delivery of that message, right?

Peter Vamos: For sure. For sure.

More and more, this stuff is being done on video.

Matthew Ley: Yeah.

Peter Vamos: It’s hard to underestimate the–you want to do something on video. You just set up in your boardroom.

Matthew Ley: Yeah.

Peter Vamos: You shoot the thing. Like, that’s not the way to do it, right? Location is the thing, right?

Matthew Ley: Yeah.

Peter Vamos: You got to really be thinking, if you’re going to be doing video, right–.

Matthew Ley: –Yeah–.

Peter Vamos: –Where you’re setting up.

Matthew Ley: And this is way too big of a subject to copy–to just handle here. We’ve talked about it. And you’re right. Do not turn your boardroom into a studio. It will not look good, just like we will not turn this into a meeting room.

But location can bring value, because it can bring hype and excitement, right? So, if you’ve got like a user conference or you’ve got an event–there’s a reason why the political commentators from NBC and CNN go to the Democratic national convention to be on the floor while it’s happening, even though there is all that noise in the background, is that it adds excitement to the day and it adds something to it. So, the–so, live from a conference or something is cool, and it works.

Another manufacturer that we know, and actually Hydro did it, a bunch of people have done it since, is they would take the show on the road.

Peter Vamos: Um-hmm.

Matthew Ley: So, they wouldn’t always do it from the head office in Toronto or wherever it is. They would go to, like, a facility actually, a manufacturing facility in another region, and they would show up. And when they showed up and broadcast from there, it had its own unique feel. The floor manager was super excited to have them and he got to say the introduction and really became part of it, but it was cool for everyone else to see these facilities they’d never seen.

One time we were doing one for a CIO, or chief investment officer, of a financial services firm. I think it was Maurer (sp). And he happened to be in China or Dubai or somewhere like that, and he was there because one of their big funds was a foreign investment fund or whatever it was.

So, he did it from there. He did it over videoconference and he showed photos of places he visited because he brought his family with him. I’m here talking to these companies and doing this. Brought my family too and saw these great things, and this is why we’re investing in X, Y and Z.

Peter Vamos: Um-hmm.

Matthew Ley: So, I don’t know that he necessarily needed to do it from the location at that moment in time, but there was something about that that gave it an authenticity and really worked.

Peter Vamos: Right.

Matthew Ley: So, I would say where possible use location as a way of enhancing what you’re doing, especially on video. And again, we have a whole–I think we did a podcast on this, about making sure that those two things match.

Peter Vamos: Yeah. Well, it’s the medium is the message, right?

Matthew Ley: Yeah.

Peter Vamos: I mean, that’s ultimately–that’s the thing.

So, we’re seeing a lot of trends.

Matthew Ley: Yeah.

Peter Vamos: We’re seeing a lot of things happening. We’re, as you know, in the last half of 2019.

Matthew Ley: Yeah.

Peter Vamos: What are some of the things you think are going to carry over? What are the things you’re seeing now that you think people can sort of bank on over the next couple years?

Matthew Ley: Well, more. That’s it. I mean, there’s just going to be more. There’s an appetite in all aspects, whether it be external and marketing communications to have more segmented media that speaks to–specifically to–or personalization speaking specifically to a buyer or a user.

There’s going to be more video. We have an entire generation that are moving into management positions who are so comfortable with video through phone and social media, there’s going to be more and more of that. And a lot of organizations have been under invested in video for a very long time, so there’s going to be more video everywhere we go.

I think there’s going to be more fun. I think we’ve left the world behind where big brands need to do everything very stuffy and very regimented, and that they’re going to be willing to in some ways have a little bit more fun and make some mistakes and play with concepts to reach people.

And the–specifically for virtual event and things like we talked about today, the multi-location/multi-presenter. It’s gotten so much more easy to bring in somebody from a phone walking down the street to an office. Even five years ago, we were still–I’m not going to say struggling, but there was still, you know, a lot of hiccups.

And so, I think that what we’re going to see is the technology has finally, I guess, caught up and networks. It’s going to allow us to really have these large events from multiple locations that really include people from everywhere participating, not simply sitting on the other end and watching and listening.

Peter Vamos: Right. So, ultimately, the humanization and the democratization of this sort of content–.

Matthew Ley: –Yeah–.

Peter Vamos: –Like we’re seeing with every other–across all these–.

Matthew Ley: –Yeah–.

Peter Vamos: –Other platforms.

Matthew Ley: Yeah, exactly.

Peter Vamos: The ability for everybody to participate. That’s great.

Matthew Ley: All right.

Peter Vamos: I think we’re done. I think we’ve covered this subject very, very well. We are coming back with a podcast, and our subject will be digging into not-for-profits and how associations can use webinars and virtual events. Until then, my name is Peter Vamos. Matthew Ley–.

As experienced Webinar Marketers, we all know that a well written and engaging Call to Action will make our Webinars more successful. If we master the craft of writing compelling CTAs, our webinar program will see increased engagement across all our content efforts. But, there are a few challenges with writing effective Calls to Action.

An “ask me anything” webinar (or AMA) is not a new format. It’s an adopted format that gained traction with Reddit users.

This week, I want to breakdown the best tips for hosting an ‘ask me anything’ webinar so that you can get the most out of this format.

Why Host An Ask Me Anything Webinar?

Webinars are a great way to get your audience engaged. Plus, it helps you to understand where your audiences are in your sales funnel. That’s why webinar platforms continue to evolve with new tools and features that assist with engagement.

While AMA’s on Reddit can be a wild card, you don’t have to worry about them in a webinar format. You can moderate the comments and questions section of a webinar so every submission gets looked at prior to answering.

Let’s jump into the 7 ‘ask me anything’ webinar tips that will help you get the most out of this webinar format.

1. Invite The Best Speaker

This one seems obvious, but it’s extremely important to your webinar success. You want your audience to get the most out of your topic. Ensure that you or your speaker know the material inside and out. That way, when faced with a difficult question during your live session, there is not a moment of hesitation.

You or your guest should always be confident about the topic you are highlighting. To ensure success, make sure the speaker can deliver on all aspects of the subject. That way, your speaker will not only feel comfortable when faced with hard questions, but also remain relaxed. This is how you will establish yourself as a Thought Leader.

2. Have A Great Moderator

The moderator has a very important job, and you’re going to need a great one—Why?

The moderator is the gatekeeper of your AMA webinar.

On top of being your gatekeeper, your moderator is also the person who keeps your audience engaged. Plus, they ensure that production is running smoothly.

Your moderator should be able to handle the following:

Walk you, and your audience, through the roadmap of the webinar.

Keep the webinar on track and on time.

Moderate questions, including inappropriate questions.

Stimulate your audience to keep questions coming through.

Select the best questions to answer in the queue.

3. Be Prepared With Question and Answers

Let’s say you have a large number of registrants. You have the best speaker and you were able to find a great moderator. In theory, this should ensure your webinar success, but sometimes, it doesn’t.

By preparing questions in advance, you guarantee that there will be no awkward pauses at any time during your event. Just because you have a lot of registrants, doesn’t mean they always ask questions. You should always have some questions in your back pocket to stimulate the conversation. This way you avoid any awkward situations.

Here are some tips to get you started:

Get participants to submit questions a couple hour prior to your webinar event.

Reach out to your sales team and identify all the questions your customers routinely ask.

Other frequently asked questions surrounding your business or product.

4. Use The Tools & Features Available To You

Depending on what webinar platform you choose to use, you should have numerous Call-To-Action widgets and tools available to you. Be sure you have a full understanding of all the features that your webinar platform provides, and how you can benefit from putting them to use.

Not all of them will work with an ‘ask me anything’ webinar. For instance, the polling feature might not make sense for this style, unless you want users to vote for the final question or an upcoming one.

Your moderator should also have extensive knowledge about these tools to assist you during your live webinar.

5. Do A Dry Run Prior To Your AMA Webinar

Although this seems obvious, this tip is one of the most important suggestions of all.

You need to make sure everything is working properly before your AMA webinar. This time can be used to make sure all of your visuals are planned and set up correctly. This step also allows you to check the audio and video quality.

A dry run will also help you with tips 3 & 4. You’ll have a chance to play around with the platform so that both you and your moderator understand how it works before going live.

6. Don't Forget The Follow-Up

Be realistic, you might not get to every question that you’re asked, and that is okay. A follow-up email will help you with that. Create an FAQ of all questions missed, most often they are similar to one another, and list out all the answers. Include this in your follow-up email along with your on-demand webinar.

This is also your opportunity to discover where your leads are in your sales funnel.

By continuing to nurture your leads with answers to questions that weren’t on the AMA provides a great way to build a relationship with your listeners and to build trust.

7. Identify Your MQLs By Their Questions

The types of questions your attendees ask can tell you a lot of information. Specifically, where they are in your sales funnel.

Let’s say you have attendees asking low-level questions like, “What does your brand do?” These are webinar attendees who want to learn more about who you are, but may not need to get on a call with your sales team right away.

Now, imagine a scenario where you have attendees asking high-level questions about your product or service. These are leads who most likely understand what you’re offering, and are trying to see how your product can solve their problems.

These are MQLs that your sales team should be reaching out because they have a higher intent in your sales journey.

Let's Recap

Ask me anything webinars make your brand more personable and you, the expert of your industry, can provide insight to viewers that they may not have had previously. Follow the 7 tips above, and you will see a great reward in this format.

Have the best speaker: Be sure you’re knowledgable about the industry, product, and brand.

Have a great moderator: Your moderator should understand the tools and know how to stimulate conversation.

Be prepared for anything: Be ready for silence, or for too many questions in the queue.

Use all the features available to you: Every webinar platform has tools & features, find the one that fits your needs.

Follow up: Nurture your top funnel leads and answer questions you didn’t have time for.

Who are your MQLs: Identify your top and bottom-of-funnel leads by the type of questions they ask.

If you’re looking to plan a webinar from the beginning, you can check out our 8-week guide to planning a webinar, and if it’s an ‘ask me anything’ webinar, come back these 7 tips once you have the plan rolling out.

In this episode, we continue our conversation on leveraging Simulive webinars. We will explore using different tools for this type of webinar style. This technique is great to 4x your webinar marketing performance. All while growing your leads and hitting your Market Qualified Lead (MQL) goals. Even while you’re on vacation.

An example of Simulive events that we touch on are the “Shark Week” style webinar summits. Tune in to learn how to exceed your MQL quota this summer.

For this episode, we are discussing the following topics:

How do you get around summer-time roadblocks? Using Simulive webinars will allow you to grow your lead-base (hitting your MQL goals) while your team and your guest speakers take their vacation time.

What content do you repurpose and how do you organize it? Was there a webinar series that you know should have done better? This might be the time to repurpose it.

How do we, at The Streaming Network, put our advice into action? We’re creating our own Simulive webinar events and summits this summer, keep watching to learn more.

Plus, we’re walking you through some other great strategies. Both on-demand and Simulive webinar events are going to be an asset this summer. So how do you put it into action?

The Complete Transcript On Simulive Webinars

Peter Vamos: Welcome to LFTF, the podcast about turning your webinars and virtual events into lead generating machines and advancing your business objectives. With me as usual, Matthew Ley, the president of The Streaming Network.

Matthew Ley: Thanks for having me, Pete, on this Friday before a long weekend when the weather is beautiful and we expect rain. And instead, I am here with you recording–.

Peter Vamos: –Here we are–.

Matthew Ley: –Two months of content in–.

Peter Vamos: –The shine is–.

Matthew Ley: –One day–.

Peter Vamos: –Not the sun coming in on our faces here.

Matthew Ley: No. No.

Peter Vamos: It is studio lighting. But it is the beginning of the summer.

Matthew Ley: It is.

Peter Vamos: And if you’re watching this on demand, perhaps it’s not where you are, people in the future. But this is summertime here in Toronto, Canada.

Matthew Ley: That’s right.

Peter Vamos: And what we wanted to talk about is using simulated-live webinars and driving MQL–driving your MQL goals through the summer.

Matthew Ley: That’s right.

Peter Vamos: Now, this is something that’s near and dear to your heart.

Matthew Ley: Yeah.

Peter Vamos: This is a subject you wanted to talk about. So, why don’t we–what do you–like, what do we–why do we want to talk about this today? Why is this important?

Matthew Ley: All right. Well, simulated live is–been talked about on the show and in emails I–you receive. And, you know, we had a client this morning doing a tour. And we talked a lot about it as a tactic to handle presenter nerves, to handle things like can’t get people in at the right time so you want to record so you can simulate it live, or making the best use out of a day in the studio, where you can record two or three and get a good ROI.

But we’ve also talked, I hope you remember, here about–.

Peter Vamos: –Yes–.

Matthew Ley: –About how simulated live is great for helping you get your ROI targets or your lead targets within your webinar program.

Peter Vamos: Yes.

Matthew Ley: Do you remember?

Peter Vamos: I do remember, of course.

Matthew Ley: Right.

So, generally speaking, when–you know, when people ask how do I get more ROI on my webinar program, I say webinar more, do more webinars, but you don’t have to always do new content. You can use old content and utilize the simulated live methodology.

Peter Vamos: Right, which is the key to this whole thing is–and that’s when we talked about doing the Shark Week of webinars.

Matthew Ley: That’s right.

Peter Vamos: Yes.

Matthew Ley: Right. So, people are listening or they come up with it on their own, or–it was never my idea to begin with. I don’t remember.

And so, many of the customers and the prospects that we’re speaking to are saying this is something that they are either doing or want to do. And some of them are struggling on the how to get it done.

And so, as summer is a time that we generally look back at how our businesses are doing and, in marketing departments, where we’re at as far as our targets and our goals are for MQLs or leads, it’s a really good time to think about utilizing that Shark Week Summit, repurposing simu-live as a way of getting yourself ready for the next buying season, which generally occurs when everyone is back from vacation in the fall.

Peter Vamos: Right. And the idea being to get more people out watching your webinars, engaged in your webinars–.

Matthew Ley: –Yeah–.

Peter Vamos: –More often. And it’s–so, what are some of ways? You want to get more people involved, but it’s summertime.

Matthew Ley: That’s right. Well, I–so, summertime proposes its own set of problems. It’s that you got your own vacations. Your speakers, your thought leaders and those people have theirs. So, it’s a tougher time to create a lot of new content.

But at the same time, there’s a whole bunch of people in our target audience who are sitting in offices that have less humans there and have less sort of initiatives on their plate. And so, they may want to spend a Friday morning or afternoon or a couple–extra time watching a webinar.

Peter Vamos: Right.

Matthew Ley: So, it’s a good time to broadcast webinars, although it’s hard to get a lot of new content going, which is why we are proposing in this podcast the idea we talked about a couple sessions go about this idea of doing summits or repurposing your content to get people out. But I want to dive into exactly how to do that with some programs that we’ve got plans for ourselves this summer and for the next couple months.

Peter Vamos: They want to engage. They still want to do professional development. Summer, actually, is a really good time to do that sort of stuff.

Matthew Ley: It is, yeah.

Peter Vamos: Okay. Well, so how do we start?

Matthew Ley: Okay. So, where we want to start is you want to start with basically taking stock of what you got. So, you got six months under your belt. For us, I’m basically taking stock of this show.

Peter Vamos: Um-hmm.

Matthew Ley: So, we’ve got six months, which would mean at least 12 podcasts or videos that we’ve done, 12 sessions. And you want to look at in your–if they’re delivered over webinar, you have data sets on them. You want to look at what performed the best. Like, what is the content that, when you put out there–maybe you knew it going into it ’cause it was your economic update or your–you know, your big sort of thought leadership event, but you want to put it in there and see what works best.

And then second, I would usually look at which webinars or videos or series or things that you did that you think you got unlucky. It was a great program. You thought it was awesome. Anyone who heard it thought it was awesome. But for some reason, it just didn’t get people out. You didn’t get the registrants or you didn’t get the viewers so you have a low performance or a low on-demand performance–.

Peter Vamos: –Right–.

Matthew Ley: –And try and give those ones another shot.

Peter Vamos: So, you run them simulated live. But how is this different? Like, I–I’m not understanding like what–.

Matthew Ley: –Right? But other things that you want to do is you want to take those webinars or that content and you want to group them into topics or–with similarities, right?

So, in our case, we did a bunch of stuff on how marketers can drive more ROI, like this piece right here, stuff on engagement tools, reporting, analytics, what you should focus on. We spent a fair amount of time this year talking about the craft of being a webinar producer, so whether it be the–how to be a good moderator or how to put together a show format that’s going to work for your audience, things like that.

And we also got into–we always mix it in, a little bit on the old-fashioned virtual event, webcast, hybrid event planning, inspiration and that sort of thing. So, I’ve got sort of three main topics that I can lump most of my stuff into, the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Matthew Ley: All right. So, that basically get you to your–to the idea that you can now group these together and they become more valuable.

So, when I offer up–you know, the promise of this piece right here, whether it be a podcast, a video, or a webinar, is how to hit your MQL goals by summer. But to your point, what if someone’s coming to this in October?

Peter Vamos: Um-hmm.

Matthew Ley: Did they miss the boat? So, what we do is we look to group these assets together, find other assets that can go with them to add value. So, how do we find those other assets?

So, what I did was I looked at partners who I know share content with me well and easily. So, I’ve got–ON24 has done a couple good pieces in the past six months that were part of this that fit into these three categories. I’ve got a reciprocal relationship with Demand Metric, and they did a piece that I really liked that fits in well. And then I’ve got–our agency did their own thing on a YouTube live or a Facebook live stream that was really good for part of this as well.

And I look at my non-webinar assets like my e-books and my calculators and anything else that we’ve got that sort of fits into these various categories. So, at this point, I’ve created nothing new, but I’ve got a whole bunch of content that is relatable to one another that I can now promote and say, rather than coming and watching this one webinar and learning this, sign up for this summit or whatever it might be and you will get X, Y, and Z–.

Peter Vamos: –Right–.

Matthew Ley: –Stuff from different sources, different types of content. You’re going to get eight assets that will help you reach your ROI goals, or eight assets that’ll help you be a better virtual event planner or whatever the topic might be.

Peter Vamos: Right. So, your reach out to all your providers.

Matthew Ley: Um-hmm.

Peter Vamos: And you–you’re bringing–now, you’re not bringing them together again. They–this is all–.

Matthew Ley: –Oh, no. I’m just asking them, you know, can I–and with ON24, I’m like, “Can I just use this webinar?” And they’re like, “Yeah,” so we copy it. Demand Metric, they’re on the platform too, same thing. Get the video file from the agency and get permission to sort of release it, because eventually what we’re going to do is we’re going to release these either on-demand together or simulated live in our summit.

So, they’re not even going to be a part of it either. They’re not going to be there that day.

Peter Vamos: Right.

Matthew Ley: No one is. In fact, I think I talk about it later, one of the tentative dates that we were playing around with I’m on vacation, so I’m not even going to be around.

Peter Vamos: Got you. I got you.

Matthew Ley: Okay.

Peter Vamos: So, everyone says yes?

Matthew Ley: Yes.

Peter Vamos: They all–everyone’s in.

Matthew Ley: Yeah.

Peter Vamos: They all get the–your pitch to them.

Matthew Ley: Yeah.

And so, I’ve got them all together. And at the same time, what I’m doing and what I have to do is I have to start segmenting my audience on who I’m going to event–invite to these, and figure out how I’m going to manage a promotional schedule over three months that is going to make the best use of this.

So, segmentation means you don’t want to be inviting the same people to the same webinar or podcast, video they already saw. So, you want to make sure that you’re segmenting properly so you’re focusing your attention on the right group of people. Those who are interested in the virtual event planning and inspiration there are a slightly different audience than the webinar craft, and it’s–and definitely a different audience than the leads or the ROI group. So, I try and do the best I can in segmenting those groups so that, when we start promoting it, we can target the right folks.

Peter Vamos: Right. Right.

Matthew Ley: So, getting that data side and knowing, you know, who is the audience, who is the demographic that you’re focusing is the next step in all this before you can even get moving.

Peter Vamos: Right. And is that considered a challenge? Is that too hard in some instances?

Matthew Ley: In some instances, it unfortunately is too hard.

Peter Vamos: Yeah.

Matthew Ley: And I’ll say that, even for us, we’re not the most data tight organization out there. We have a lot of feeding data sources that come in from the leads and information production, so we–so, for us, it’s not the easiest thing either. And for a lot of our customers, this is where it falls down.

Peter Vamos: Um-hmm.

Matthew Ley: A fear of over saturating their list, a fear that they already offered to this kind of stuff and they don’t want to send it out to the same people again, so there is a concern about that.

And it’s okay. You know, there are ways of handling it. I saw a customer do this which played really well, which was just to be completely transparent. It’s halfway through the year. We’ve done a ton of stuff on the craft of webinars. You may have caught our podcast, or this series or that series. If you didn’t, come to this webinar series. It’s going to have these points on it. It may be important for you.

That way, even if they were invited or already heard it, they can decide not to come and you’re not–you know, it’s not a big deal. There’s no lunch bag letdown. You’ve got–always got new blood in your list, so you’re going to hit people who weren’t around when we did it the first time and–or people who just forgot about it and never attended it. So, it’s being transparent and honest.

And if you really can’t segment your list, you know, you may not want to do three things like I’m doing. Maybe do two, but give the audience a choice. We have these two summits coming up. One’s on this and one’s on that, track A, track B, register now for each one that you want.

Peter Vamos: You may not have seen this one.

Matthew Ley: Whatever’s important.

Peter Vamos: You saw this one.

Matthew Ley: Yeah.

Peter Vamos: You have lead-ins and things like that.

Matthew Ley: We’re sort of bringing them together, because in our case, and I’m sure in our customers cases, these might be two different summits or three different summits depending on what you’re looking at.

And we have a third strategy that we’re going to discuss that–but what–they’re all targeted at people who would use our product or service. So, there is crossover, and it’s fine. Just like a conference that has different tracks, you know, we’re going to offer different tracks and people can opt into the one they want.

Matthew Ley: –Well, I don’t know how much creativity. Hopefully, the content stands on its own. But I think, you know–.

Peter Vamos: –But there is a craft to it.

Matthew Ley: Well, there’s a craft. There’s a few simple things that you’re going to want to do.

Peter Vamos: Right.

Matthew Ley: Right. So, if you’re going to give people a value of 10 assets or 20 assets, four webinars or one or whatever it is, then you’re going to want them to opt in through one place, right, so creating a landing page.

We use Unbounce, a great Canadian company out of Vancouver; cost-effective, ties into our platform quite easily. And we’re going to allow people to register for the craft of webinars or the virtual event planning one through two different Unbounce pages.

Peter Vamos: Right.

Matthew Ley: So, they will see on that page all the various assets that they’re going to get, the fact that we’ll send them the recordings, the fact that it’ll be available on demand, the fact they’ll get these e-books and all of that fun stuff.

And we’re going to let them register once for this Friday in July where the–or August where they’re going to be able to attend and view it all or get the on-demand afterwards. That link will also house all the on-demand recordings afterwards as well so anyone who didn’t show up can come back.

Peter Vamos: Right.

Matthew Ley: So–and make it easy for them. Push to that date. And we’re going to clear our general promotional schedules for both months around that. That’ll be the only two things that we’re doing. So, we’re going to make them the focus.

Peter Vamos: Right.

Matthew Ley: And by making them the focus, it’s going to allow us to employ other strategies that don’t mess with other things we might have going on.

So, one strategy is we’re going to put a link in our customer service response signatures, client services, CSMs and all that, so they’re also pushing people towards it. Really, sales will be able to do it as well in their–sort of their leave-behinds in their summer prospecting. And in our standard emails that go out to either our user group or our Friday email where people learn about this podcast, we’re going to invite people in there as well.

So, it’ll be a call to action that goes for the entirety of a month before we switch over to the second call to action that we will be promoting for the next month.

Peter Vamos: Right. And it doesn’t even necessarily have to be video. It could just be audio, whatever the–.

Matthew Ley: Our–yeah, I mean, our focus for our own ROI, not our ROI series, but our focus on it for our own ROI is what everyone wants, is to get more out of less, right? So, there’s some work that needs to be done here. But the amount of work to do what we’re talking about versus the amount of work of putting on a live summit in the summer is completely different.

Peter Vamos: Right.

Matthew Ley: So, we got a landing page, which most of you already have templates for. It’s just about filling in the content. You’ve got to take–make the work, the plan. What’s the stuff that you’re going to use?

We actually have a planned to do two simulated live days and then one just aggregation of content. So, we’re going to be introducing a new way of accessing our content on our website. Something that we’re playing around with is like this webinar master class series. So, a bunch of the content that’s relative to that are our webinar–sort of getting return on investment stuff is going to go there as the reason to sign up for the master class.

Peter Vamos: Um-hmm.

Matthew Ley: And that’s all on demand. We’re not going to do anything live about that. That’s going to be Evergreen. It’s just going to kind of be always running for us. But the big call to action is we’re launching this master class series. Come on in and you’ll get access to all the stuff. Sign up, and, you know, this summer we’re launching these eight things that you can–that are the big driver to go into it.

But in every case, what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to take all of this content that we did all year long, the best of it, the stuff that we want to highlight, and get as many people as possible to consume it.

Peter Vamos: Um-hmm.

Matthew Ley: So, where a lot of the podcast content we release for free on podcast networks, on our blog, on YouTube, as we put it into a webinar format, which we often do, and make it a part of the summit, we’re able to track everyone who watches them whether live or on-demand completely, value of the platform, and get that information into our CRM so we can take people into that MQL status, which is what we’re looking for, are to move people through the process and get them consuming our content in the summer, tracking it so that we’ve got a nice pipeline for the fall.

Peter Vamos: Right.

Matthew Ley: Right.

So, basically, the–our general strategy has been three programs throughout the summer only. All three programs are going to be aggregated content. Two will be live summits and one will be this just collection of on-demand assets that’s going into this new program called the master class series. And from there, it’s going to be about promoting it through email, like we said, with a segmented list, but also this is where we’re going to put our ad buys towards. They’re going to be to each of these–.

Peter Vamos: –Right–.

Matthew Ley: –Segments so we can get new blood in and give people consuming, and making sure we’re in a position–which we are because it’s on the webinar tool and not on social media or on the podcast network. We’re going to be able to track who’s watched what, how long, and who is the most engaged so that we can ensure that they are sort of that MQL.

Peter Vamos: So, the summertime, obviously, there’s–it has its own unique challenges in terms of promotion–.

Matthew Ley: –Um-hmm–.

Peter Vamos: –In terms of driving traffic. I know you talk about, you know, getting ad buys out there. But is there–is–are there things to do to track people? Is there a different way of doing it?

Matthew Ley: Maybe, but we’re, like most people on this, also strapped with limited budgets, right?

Peter Vamos: Um-hmm.

Matthew Ley: So, we’re going to get what is the most ROI. Most people register for these things still from an email.

Peter Vamos: Right.

Matthew Ley: And although ad buying, we’ve seen success in certain targeted, like, look-alike audiences through LinkedIn and the like, we are going to supplement it with that. But the main way that we’re going to get people through this is going to be people that we sort of invite ourselves, or people that we reach out to and get into it to see the great content that we believe we’ve produced over the last six months.

Are there other ways that I’ve seen effective? Truly, yes, there is. You know, there’s–I’ve been given personal invites in the mail to attend these things, I’ve been called and personally invited, if you have cycles to do those things. But I think that’s another webinar on how to get people–.

Peter Vamos: –Yeah–.

Matthew Ley: –Out through the non-conventional.

The key here is it can be–it is–what I want to get across is, you know, once you’ve pulled your content together in such a way and you have–know what segments you’re going after, that you can quite easily reuse your content in a new way. And that new way is simply by lumping it together with other valuable content.

Peter Vamos: Got you. Okay.

One of the things we want to talk about is this is hard for some people–.

Matthew Ley: –Yeah–.

Peter Vamos: –The difficulty. Like, one of the challenges in terms of pulling this together?

Matthew Ley: Yeah. So, I think we’ve already talked about one challenge, which is the data, because if you want to email people you’ve got that fear.

Peter Vamos: Yeah.

Matthew Ley: And then the other one which is, I think if you’re less prolific than we are with–so we–we’re in a fairly unique situation where we’re highly prolific in our content creation. But we–and we have a lot of new data sources of sort of–I call them a webinar–people who are learning the webinar craft but aren’t maybe ready to buy or anything like that. And so, we know that there is a high volume of people in our databases that have not seen the content that we’ve presented this year. It’s simple.

So, for people who weren’t as prolific as us but are–so, they’re more worried about the fact that they’ve promoted this all to this database. The database has very limited movement in it. They’re not sure about the ad buying side of it, so they think this is a lot of work for nothing and they’re just going to be sending the same stuff to the same people. That’s the concern that I think–.

Peter Vamos: –Right–.

Matthew Ley: –That will make some people here say it’s going to be too hard for me to make sure I don’t piss off people on my list and get that awful opt out that I don’t want to do. It’s going to be counterintuitive for me.

Peter Vamos: Right.

Matthew Ley: And to them I say you might be overthinking it, but you might not.

And so, one strategy that I’ve put forward, and we’re going to have to do it in one of our series just based around the way the content played out, is by you your self or somebody on your team producing another piece of content–but wait, before you get–I said there wasn’t going to be a lot of new content produced. But just taking webinars’ content maybe from–that you’ve recorded at maybe one of your conferences. You might have some of that that hasn’t been used. Maybe you get some of this third-party content in, and then having someone record a webinar or webinars where you throw to the content the way that a news anchor throws to prerecorded segments that happened earlier that day.

And this doesn’t have to be done in a studio or anything like that. This could be done over audio where you simply say, okay, today we’re talking about, I don’t know, the craft of webinars. And in the craft of webinars, you know, I’m going to start off with, you know, how to be a great moderator. It’s an important subject and we’re going to start with 15 minutes from a podcast that was released earlier this year where Matt goes through how he becomes an moderator. So, let’s go to that and then we’ll take your questions and do whatever.

And then you push that video as a slide, or there’s many ways different platforms do it. But then you go to–that becomes the basis of that webinar, and then it comes back and you get sort of questions answered or whatever, and move on to the next topic.

So, you’re using the video or the former webinar or the content that you’ve produce in those webinars, that you’ve gotten from different sources, and you create an agenda of maybe two hours where you are pushing out these things, you know, snippets from these things. So, it would be framed differently even for the same audience.

Hopefully, it’s a more complete thought for them too, and allows you to offer up a new and unique piece of content to everyone. That’s for the people who are afraid that, you know, they’ve saturated their audience and–.

Peter Vamos: –Right–.

Matthew Ley: –They’re not going to show up to–.

Peter Vamos: –Right–.

Matthew Ley: –The same webinar, or be mad if they show up to the same webinar they already have.

Peter Vamos: So, it’s interesting, because it ultimately–I mean, you’re planning your marketing around 12 months of the year. This is a great strategy for what to do in the summer. You know it’s coming around. You can be planning. You don’t even have to necessarily be shooting new stuff in the summer because it you know it’s coming, so you just–whenever you’re set up–.

Matthew Ley: –That’s right–.

Peter Vamos: –Doing another webinar, do that summer piece–.

Matthew Ley: –Yeah–.

Peter Vamos: –Right? Do that piece and we’re going to insert it in something because no one’s going to be around and we can just kind of–.

Matthew Ley: –Yeah–.

Peter Vamos: –Piece it all together.

Matthew Ley: Yeah. And I think–like, you know, this is something that we’ve been planning kind of all year. And the way that we plan–.

Peter Vamos: –Yeah–.

Matthew Ley: –Which is I’m sure the way–like a lot of people plan, right? Reactive, we change, you know, whatever. We’ve kind of been planning this all year and talking about it but sort of hadn’t gotten around to it. And the impetus for making it happen was the same thing that everyone else has.

You know, we don’t have the MQL lead flow that we want right now. We were–we’ve been investigating and looking at different ways that we want to make that happen. This was one that was on the roadmap and needed to be done.

And we–in our content strategy, it may be a little bit easier for us than those who are coming at it as a brand-new idea. We did have things kind of lumped already. It was going to be–it was easy to pick out which ones are this, which ones are that, and which ones are flyers like our not-for-profit or our legal webinars, podcasts that have nothing to do with what we’re talking about here. So, it–this was an easier strategy for me in pulling together what assets that I wanted or needed.

Peter Vamos: Right.

Matthew Ley: So, it’s a–it’s something that I’m hearing my own prospects now that we’re coming to first telling me they’re doing. It’s something that I have seen work well. I’ve signed up for these. And so, it’s a strategy that clearly is working out there in the market. And this was–the attempt here today was to get a little more granular in how to make it happen.

Peter Vamos: Right. Right.

Matthew Ley: Because all this–.

Peter Vamos: –And it’s important insights because ultimately any show is taking advantage of, you know, tendencies amongst the audience.

Matthew Ley: Um-hmm.

Peter Vamos: And we have–we know audiences are–they have a little more free time.

Matthew Ley: Yep.

Peter Vamos: This is the kind of stuff they won’t necessarily be consuming as they head towards year-end when they’re busy and they’re–.

Matthew Ley: –Right–.

Peter Vamos: –Doing budgets. This is the perfect time to do this thing. It’s a good audience insight and it’s a good strategy around that–.

Matthew Ley: –Yeah, and–.

Peter Vamos: –Which is why it works–.

Matthew Ley: –If they’re going invest the time, it’s kind of like, you know, when you listen to this podcast, right, today is about this one strategy. And if you come to it, you’re like, great, but what you do the rest of the year, right, and then you go back and find another one or whatever it is.

Well, what we’re trying to do and most people try and do is they try and get around a topic more holistically with one of the summits.

Peter Vamos: Um-hmm.

Matthew Ley: It’s not five pieces of content that don’t relate to one another. It’s like walk away from the craft of our webinar summit and learn, you know, how to be a moderator, how to create a show format, how to, you know, insert your engagement things, basically walk away from that and be like, okay, I know the craft now. I’m going to make my next webinar awesome because I’m going to employ these 10 things that I saw from start to finish.

And so, it can be a better learning–it’s not just about perceptually they’re getting more. If they spend the time with the content, they’re in the mindset of the craft of webinars. They’re going to get more out of it.

Peter Vamos: Right.

Matthew Ley: They’re going to come away with it as a pretty darn good webinar producer if they invest all that time with us.

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About the author

Matt Ley is the current President and co-founder of The Streaming Network. Starting his career in virtual events in 2007, Matt is an industry veteran that is passionate about helping customers stand out in their industry with compelling virtual events that people want to attend. The driving ambition for Matt is that virtual events are not a utility for information distribution but an opportunity for firms to create a competitive advantage. Matt is an accomplished speaker, moderator and a sought-after thought leader.